Toady will you, at any point, have apocalyptic events within the game? I'm talking invasions of Angels/demons, angry gods, natural disasters, plagues and so on. If you do in fact have plans for these, how do you think they will be implemented.

That would be interesting. I recall that Toady has apparently mentioned the idea of opening up the Fun Tubes as potentially leading to apocalyptic aftereffects. Since we no longer use the "you are fucked sir and/or madam, have a randomly-occurring game over" mechanic from way back in 23a, this means the main stumbling block would be checking whether a wrecked fortress left the demons able to escape.

Though technically, this already seems to happen to a limited extent. If you open hell up and lose the fort, select numbers of them will infest the area around the fort. But I don't know if it does any sanity-checking for how secure the breach is, and it seems limited to demons that were present at the site when you lost the fort. They just kinda spread out like dwarves fleeing an abandoned fort tend to.

The Work Orders update was truly fantastic. Have you given any thought to adding a similar quality-of-life improvement to the labors interface? Honestly, that is the only part of the GUI which I really feel I need a mod/utility to handle. Trying to manage the labors for more than a handful of Dwarves using the ingame menus is truly cumbersome.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

And yeah Toady's mentioned replacing this altogether with...something else. Actually, would be interesting to hear if this 'something else' is any clearer yet or still waiting for just the right Strange Mood to hit before it gets looked at.

We don't yet know what's going to happen there. It'll likely happen during the embark scenarios rewrite. The idea of what you are and how much and what sort of autonomy dwarves should have will be a little more clear/diverse at that point, and it does need to be done.

Quote from: LordBaal

I know this is kind of a tangent but now with artifact weapons, do you see feasible a little rework for ranged weapons? Specially customable reloading time? This I think is important to differentiate crossbows from bows and blowguns.

Also, artifact clothing in fortress and adventurer mode, will be of any practical use? Will they be subject to wear and tear?

On a tangent (on what already is a tangent), what about leather size being determinative to the kind and amount of products made? Have you thought about making different size animals give off different amounts of leather? Different products employing different amounts of material or something else?

I don't have any near-term plans along these lines, though we'd wanted to mess with ranged weapons for a while.

Quote from: Nopenope

Which features in your long-term list are you the most looking forward to working on? Which feature in general do you think will be the most painful to implement?

I'm interested in everything -- that's why it's on the list! The magic and myth stuff is going to be great fun to work on, and boats should be fun. I imagine getting the world economy to work nicely with framerate and in any sort of passable way will be a nightmare.

Quote from: FantasticDorf

Do you ever foresee a application of a UI window much like in the fortress mode side panel to help handle backlogs of quests (specific item recovery) that can be pursued in the world?

And possibly that specific fortress mode UI as a placeholder for giving instructions to go out into the world, by setting your own 'quests' such as this group of dwarves embarks on a quest to go build a hillock on the next door embark tile or lead so-and so army or join up with a bigger one etc, giving purpose to movement and leaving the map while still connecting you with the action with notifications on progress.

You have 'Q'. I imagine that'll keep changing as the game changes. I don't know at this point how the fort dwarf excursions are going to work.

Quote from: TheFlame52

I recently did some science where I jacked humans' hostility values up to 100 and generated worlds. One thing I saw that was interesting was succession wars - sets of civil wars that all occurred following the death of a law-giver. Was that intentional? What causes it?

I'm not sure what you mean by hostility values, so it's hard for me to evaluate. There are some personality checks, but it doesn't really properly recognize succession wars despite the multiple position claims, although people can be unkind to each other and fight more. That part of the game is kind of a mess.

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Quote from: FantasticDorf

Can't rush quality but how's Threetoe's latest story coming along?

Quote from: Dirst

Threetoe's stories are generally describing Dwarf Fortress as it is intended to look in the future. But has this ever gone backwards, with some implementation detail or even bug making its way into a story?

Outline is done. The experiences of people playing the game and stories we've run into often make it back into the reward stories. The development of elves overall has been a sort of feedback loop. If elves had been loved by the community they might not have ended up cannibals, but the first-release elves were designed to be annoying, so... it was inevitable.

Quote from: Robsoie

In the (far) future, will we see more blending between adventure and fortress mode or will they stay separate game modes ?

I mean by example not having to quit a game in fortress mode to start one in adventure mode, but switch out of your overseer position and simply either take control of one of your fort citizen/visitor or creating a character on the fly, or when visiting one of your fortresses, just switch to the overseer position of it at any time ?

We're hoping for the modes to continue to evolve, as people mentioned, and moving between roles without having to quit can be a part of that. I'm still not convinced it's a good idea to just be able to control whomever whenever you want. It's not just about "cheating". A sense of dwarven autonomy is important to the stories that come out of the game.

Quote from: Max^TM

will heroic items include anything in their description which details how they acquired that status, or will this need to be learned through conversations/legends/storytelling?

I haven't added anything like this. There's always going to be tension between proper learning and quick exposition, and I'm not even sure what the ideal situation is, since it is time consuming to have to ask about everything, but it's also good not to just have it all out there in the case where some mystery or confusion is warranted (and info dumps can be irritating).

Quote from: FantasticDorf

Is there any contingency plan to address native animal item thieves and whether goods stolen off a site by animal thieves can be found or reclaimed from the wilderness? (a generated lair for a troop of rhesus macaques for instance, be it a particularly large tree or some other kind of thing)

I don't have a section in the dev notes to handle this, and I'm not sure what'll happen. It's best of course for artifacts to not be lost entirely, but even the artifacts lost in regions in world gen can be practically impossible to find (even with exact x/y locations that work, because the map is so large in tiles).

That said, demanded/offered artifact will be better understood and findable as a result of the upcoming diplomacy changes, and we might have some related changes to other currently-stranded items.

Quote from: Button

Would you mind putting the simple suggestions list on the site somewhere? It would be nice to know which tweaks are likely to be coming next.

I don't know which ones are coming next, and I don't want to build expectations. I also don't want another public list to maintain (the reason the original dev pages are down).

Quote from: Butterfly

Will stealing Holy Relics from a temple cause the thief to get cursed in the same way toppling statues in a temple transforms you into a Vampire or a Werebeast?

It doesn't currently happen, but it would make sense (along with various other things like killing priests etc.). I doubt we'll focus on that again until the entire setup is gutted by the myth rewrite.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

Will other adventurers gain reputation as they wander the world rescuing artifacts and such?

Yeah, any recorded incident is used in reputation calculations, and old rumors are baked into permanent reputations. It's not clear exactly to what extent that'll matter.

Quote from: isitanos

Also, I don't remember whether groups can give in to demands to avoid war? I imagine the huge goblin army showing at your door demanding you surrender "ShieldBattered the Shiny of Shinies, a wood bracelet menacing with spikes of Adamantine" so the chief's wife can wear it. Then if you actually send someone out to give the bracelet, they might leave peacefully. (Or decapitate the bearer and laugh at you and proceed with the siege, if they feel particularly cruel.)

There's not much diplomacy right now, or even demands to meet -- there's an abstract tribute offer that can be accepted, but no goods actually change hands. It does put off war, but you can't check it anywhere. We're going to do a bit in fort mode for this time, and there are artifact peace offerings that matter over a period of years for wars in general, but it's not going to be more than that.

Quote from: Xinrai

Will holy symbols become more prioritized targets for groups with an opposing sphere of worship? Will other individuals/groups prioritize artifacts as well, such as fighters preferring weapons/armor over other items or dragons wanting objects made of gold?

Nope. There might be something to do with the artifact's utility (I have a note for it), but I have no idea if I'll accomplish anything in that direction.

Quote from: Nopenope

Given how megabeasts are able of quite advanced interactions such as taking over sites, stealing artifacts (despite potentially lacking any bodypart that can grasp them) and being objects of worship, have you ever considered making them 'intelligent' in some way (whether [CAN_LEARN], [CAN_SPEAK] or whatever special tag's in store for interacting with mythic beings)? Do you have plans to expand beyond their being big dumb tameable animals once myth generation gets fleshed out and they get presumably integrated into it?

Among the raw-file megabeasts, the dragon is the one with tension in that regard I think (being intelligent, semi-intelligent, and non-intelligent in sources), and they're complicated because we always wanted to use them as a test case for raw-file-guided generation of a critter. So they've been in stasis like many other parts of the game.

Quote from: DVNO

How extensively will non-player Adventurers hunt for artifacts?

For example, consider this scenario; A King sends out a NPC hero to retrieve an artifact ring from a Dragon's cave. However, the player steals the ring before the NPC hero can arrive. When the NPC hero arrives at the empty cave, will he just stamp his feet, swear a little, and return home? Or, will he continue on his hunt and track the player down? Do foot prints and witnesses come into play? Does the hero shake down the player for the artifact with that new bandit mugging behavior?

It's hard to say at this point how it'll turn out, since it depends on rumors and the player's ownership of the artifact will probably not be immediate knowledge for them. Doing a criminal investigation at the scene would be difficult to code, but witnessing is possible -- those accounts already form the basis for death rumors in the game. The issue is having to do inventory witnesses for held/worn artifacts, which could be lag-inducing or otherwise cause problems, but for artifacts certain allowances should be made, and it's much more likely for artifact seekers and protectors than third parties to get this behavior at first. It won't be clear how far we can take it this time until some of the gears are spinning.

Quote from: Brightgalrs

Any way we can get the UTTERANCES rules out of being hard-coded?

Even though I said eventually in 2007, we haven't gotten to any of the big language changes since then, so it's still waiting.

Quote from: callisto8413

In Fortress Mode will there ever be a way for the player to assign orphans to married couples? For example, babies or toddlers who have lost their parents to combat, accidents, or FBs?

I know the way things work now bothers a lot of people. I'm not sure when I'll address it though -- it takes a bit of work to put in a new family relationship, so it would have to be an actual project rather than a whim.

Quote from: golemgunk

Will npc's knowledge of an artifact's location be tied to rumors?

Like, if someone is heading to plunder an artifact, and you find it first and run off with it, will they automatically come after you instead of heading toward it's previously known location, even if you didn't tell anyone you have it? Would npc's say anything if they saw you carrying an artifact? It would be neat if you could steal something and secretly hide it somewhere, making it lost to all but those who know where you put it.

Also, How would an npc treasure hunter react if they knew you're carrying an artifact they're after? Would they try to kill you on the spot, or mug you like bandits do, barter for it, or even just nicely ask you to give it to them?

That's the hope, yeah. We'll see if it's enough when the rubber hits the road.

There's the basic situation where they don't know if you're the thief (no witnesses of theft), but they catch you holding the artifact when you enter their site. Can you just say you were returning it if you stole it? What if you took it from the actual thief and you actually are returning it and should be a hero to them? It's not something we can easily handle, and to make the game playable they'll probably have to err on the side of believing you, but then you have an exploit where you can steal and return items to gain rep. Assuming the guards work well at all (so it isn't easy), perhaps that exploit is close enough to reality that they shouldn't be 100% suspicious the first time it happens.

Ha ha, you'd hope the npc treasure hunter could do each of those four things, right? I'm not sure what we'll get to, but it's certainly a situation we have to handle.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

Will the full range of quests be available to npc adventurers (beasts, bandits, war as well as artifacts)? What will npc adventurers be doing in between quests? Will they be building reputation on their own by raiding tombs, hunting monsters, travelling into the underworld and so on just like players? Or roaming from town to town until a hearth gives them a quest?

Also, how much of what they do will be abstracted? Will we actually get to run into them deep in a kobold cave somewhere as they hunt for artifacts if we're there at the same time? Will they be proactively going about their quests, or just hanging around until we go away and they can get on with things?

Artifacts are the focus this time. Of course we'd like to do the others, but we might not this time. Artifacts have the added benefit of not dying when the quest is complete, whereas we don't really have robust systems in place for handling the mass die-off which would no doubt ensue when the non-player heroes start killing all the quest targets. It'll take more care to handle those kinds of quests.

The local action part is always annoying (it was the worst part of the site claim activation stuff, and we skipped it for things like destroying buildings). It's quite possible your presence on the same tile map will screw up their questing behavior at first, but we'll give it a shot (as we did with site claims).

Quote from: Arthropleura

Will NPC adventurers ask other NPCs and possibly the player, to join them on adventures?

They have world gen adventuring buddies, and I'm hoping to keep that going, yeah. I don't know if they'll ask the player -- the whole idea of having a boss that is very particular about your location and tasks and wants you to follow them around is pesky and has implementation annoyances all over.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

How robust is the rumour/information system when it comes to entities tracking the location of artifacts they want?

What I mean is, if npc adventurer group A is sent out to recover an artifact from a lair and they get ambushed/backstabbed there by a mean player adventurer deep underground who makes off with the artifact himself, how long will it take for the original entity to find out what happened?

Will they work it out upon discovery of the bodies by a later adventurer group, or will they have to wait until rumours reach them that I've actually got it (and can I prevent this somehow by 'hiding' the artifact somewhere)? Will the entity keep sending pointless excursions to the original lair in the belief that the artifact is still there?

Right now, it depends on the witnesses and where it happened. Events that aren't seen by an escaping witness don't become common knowledge until a year later, I think, and are never passed around as rumors. I don't know if it'll stay that way through the upcoming additions.

Body discoveries are a bit weird, as we've all noted in the past -- if they see the bodies locally somehow, they might get psychic knowledge of your involvement in the murder, but that doesn't tell them about the artifact. And if they don't see the bodies in a loaded tile map, they won't know anything. If we get to the inventory witnessing we mentioned elsewhere in this fotf post, then those rumors will eventually travel the world and you'll be on the hook for artifact (even if it has left your possession, until more information spreads around). We can only hope for a lot of Maltese Falcon style bumbling!

We'll have to handle a sort of negative rumor for failed excursions which report back. We don't really have a comparable situation right now, I don't think, so it'll have to be something new.

Quote from: Eric Blank

Will entities who treasure an artifact they don't have in their possession at the moment take it personally if the player comes along and grabs it before they can?

Will individuals be upset if you have an artifact they want?

Will they recognize artifact theft? If you steal an artifact out of their site, will they despise you for it or come after you now, or will that have to wait until the law & thieving update down the line?

Yeah, the game probably wouldn't work if they always consider you a thief, but they'd certainly want it back. It came up elsewhere in the fotf response what form their "request" might take, and we're not sure which ones we'll get to.

If there's a witnessed taking of an artifact, it'll likely be recognized as bad bad rep for the taker in this release, even if it isn't specifically regarded as a "crime" in the fort sense.

Quote from: falcc

How do things become holy relics in world generation? Is each religious figure restricted to one artifact in their lifetime/after they're butchered? Can someone lose a pinky in life, become deserving of a relic later, and then their pinky bone is the relic or are they always constructed at someone's death? Can heirlooms or crafted artifacts become holy relics later on? Can holy relics become heirlooms for another entity? Will adventurers be able to create or influence the creation of holy relics? Will forts be able to produce holy relics if they have especially prominent temples, and would that have to wait until start scenarios?

He he he, it doesn't keep track of the parts they lose while alive as anything more than wounds. So yeah, it just butchers them for a relic, or uses an inventory item (abstractly speaking, since it doesn't generate clothing and trickets for every hf).

Hmm... I don't think I made heirlooms relicable, but I might be wrong. Holy relics can certainly become heirlooms/treasures/symbols for another hf or entity, for instance when the temple is looted or when a thief steals them. Adventurers don't create them at this point, and dwarf mode relics will have to wait (since they don't have religion entities in the forts yet).

Quote from: Egan_BW

If you're playing adventurer mode and you come across an artifact, will you automatically know it's name, or will it just be a "masterwork leather throng" until you identify it somehow?

Everything is pre-identified. Ideally, you wouldn't know, but that takes some work and would probably be too frustrating right now, when it's hard enough to find stuff in the first place.

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Quote from: thvaz

Weapons, jewelry, and others kinds of artifacts that can be worn will be effectively worn by its owners? And furniture artifacts, will they be used? Or will they all be kept safe somewhere, or displayed? Maybe it will depend from owner to owner or situation to situation?

Quote from: Rockphed

In related vein, will crowns and scepters be properly used by their owners?

We're going to take a stab at it, but there will probably be some annoyances, especially for adv mode owners (since they don't have access to all the fort inventory management). Furniture will likely just be on display without any use -- it doesn't really understand anything well enough to make proper use of it in adv maps, and they don't do things like eat on tables anyway.

Quote from: TheFlame52

Will I ever be able to melt down a metal FB into bars?

It's a reasonable thing, but I have no idea.

Quote from: LordBaal

Again, most likely is outside the scope but do you think to convert workshops into zones(carpenter workshop with tables, workbenches, tools, cabinets, chests, nails..), seeing you creates another kind of zone. Or will that take too much effort at this point to be a low hanging code-fruit?

Converting workshops into zones is a large project. I don't understand "seeing you creates another kind of zone".

Quote from: falcc

Once you get to property and/or thievery do you forsee differentiating between how entities respond to stealing an object from someone vs taking an item off of their corpse? Obviously all thievery is weird in DF right now, but it seems really odd if some traveler goes off with a city guard one day and comes back in the guard's clothes that they wouldn't be hassled about it even if they can tell the villagers the story of the guard being killed by a night troll. Will there ever be concepts of/punishments for graverobbing beyond war if you steal a civ's artifact? What are some of the programming barriers, if any?

It's a difficult problem all around. Ideally, we'd like to do what we can to have people react in culture-appropriate ways. Just storing the ownership/entity information needed for reliable recognition of a situation is hard enough, and it's better for people to not react than to overreact to a situation, in terms of the game being playable. I'll be happy with a bare minimum at first, which is just getting a basic recognition of different sorts of property in place for different individuals/entities, mainly for the living.

Quote from: peasant cretin

Will we ever see civ specific positions given arms/armor? I always thought it odd to see the sheriff, militia commander, caption captain of the guard, hammerer, champion, or those randomly genned bandit positions completely unarmed.

It needs a lot of work and we hope it is better at some point.

Quote from: stinkasectomy

with display cases and pedestals, will intelligent creatures react to displays of body parts with emotions?

will display cases/ pedestals have a limit on what is placed in/on them?

Yeah, it calls all the relevant code for the displayed items.

There's a type limit (no large furniture). I wasn't picky about how much space there is (pedestal items aren't containers, so there wasn't an easy solution around, and I didn't want to do a different interface for display cases so I didn't care there either).

Quote from: WordsandChaos

Will more mundane items be 'owned' by individuals and family entities? As a kind of juxtaposition to the granduer of stealing the holy artefact cake tin of Urist McRoyalBaker, and the ensuing ten year long World War of Doughs, it'd be interesting to see Jeff steal Roger's socks because his have all disintegrated or he's adamant that the colour blue compliments his toenails.

The property rewrite is meant to allow for this. We do have some item ownership in the fort right now, but the systems are too cumbersome to set up general crimes and trouble throughout the world, so we haven't focused on it.

Quote from: vlademir1

Do display cases and pedestals have a quality value like other furniture? If so, is there any intent to, whether within the current new feature implementation or at some indistinct future point, have dwarf thoughts about incongruous displays (such as the equivalent of displaying a Faberge egg on some random poorly constructed Ikea shelf)?

The new items have qualities, but nothing really has negative quality. I'm not sure what'll happen specifically when negative quality is in the game. We almost put it in a release or two back, and it was sitting in the short-term add box, but now I have no idea when it'll happen. It'll be great fun when a dwarf with absolutely no skill starts putting out improvised tables and shoddy chairs and the dwarves get to comment on them... or break them when they sit down too fast or something. Your suggestion is quite specific though, and not likely a thing that would have made it in on its own. Many of the questions this time would be better preserved in the suggestions forum.

Quote from: Daniel the Finlander

Will there be a priest occupation in dwarf mode?

There isn't for the current temples because of how the religion entities are separated from the site entities (and we don't currently handle having multiple entities active in the fort other than your overall civilization and your fort's entity). We probably won't have changes for this until we get to religion-related embark scenarios, where this issue will be central. There's a chance for some changes during the myth stuff, but I wouldn't guarantee anything there.

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Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

So, while everyone is getting understandably excited about displaying the corpses of their victims, Dwarven ethics (make_trophy_sapient) won't actually let this happen without modding, right?

Quote from: FantasticDorf

If the above quotation is true, aren't head spikes/nooses/horrible chopped up body displays basically goblin derived museum spaces meant to inflict negative thoughts deliberately upon people who witness them, but satiate goblins? How might other races prefer to display/(or not) their prized/valuable goods and decorations as culturally appropriate?

I dunno. Museum corpses can be complicated. Trophy ethics don't necessarily apply. Though I haven't thought very much about the game's cultural differences here.

Quote from: ProjectXMark1

Seeing as fortress starting scenarios are coming a couple of releases down the line, will there be generalisation of this, so that, for example, a legendary swordsman could set up hidden mountain training grounds?

Also, do you ever intend on implementing different game speeds to fortress/adventure mode?

The generalization is the property/law/custom etc. framework that'll allow the embark scenarios to happen. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to get to, but the fortress start scenarios aren't going to be in a vacuum. The changes throughout the world will be sweeping (even if sites themselves remain the same in a lot of ways).

Lag is enough of a problem in regular play that game speed controls would probably be too unreliable to be justified.

Quote from: Nopenope

1. Will dwarven adventurers be occasionnally taken by strange moods?2. How do you envision invasions for the sake of an artifact to play out in Fortress mode? Will there be a goblin spokesperson of some kind saying "We must have X" or will it be psychically understood by all dwarves that these specific invaders want specific artifact X? Should the player yield, how do you envision the delivery of the artifact? Will there be something like a diplomacy screen, a specific job "deliver artifact to invaders" or just a dump job coupled with goblins pathfinding to your artifact and wordlessly taking it away?3. Will megabeasts, night creatures, bandits and non-goblin civs be able to demand an artifact as well? In the latter case, will there be diplomatic consequences involved?4. Will single adventurers target your fortress for artifacts, showing up as visitors, hostiles or otherwise?5. Assuming artifacts get stolen by animals like keas, do they get tracked by the game so that they could end up in another site?6. Will the item type of the artifact bear any relevance to the invaders, in other words will they be as likely to demand a platinum war hammer as an elf bone earring, assuming both were crafted in your fortress?7. Do necro books and named weapons in Fortress mode count as artifacts in that system, or will they eventually fall off the artifact list?

1. Not at present. Even in the fort it's more of a non-soldier thing. It would be an involved project to get it up and working for adventurers as well, interface-wise, and many of the materials wouldn't be available unless you were at a player-made fort.2. Since the demand is meant to be a choice for the player, it'll have to be expressed by somebody. I'm not sure if the hand-off will happen... in the depot, perhaps? Something like that.3. Non-goblin civs probably will at first. I don't know that I'll get to anything with the others.4. Yeah, though it's unclear at this point exactly what angle or angles they'll take.5. Not at present.6. I'm not sure. There are certainly things they could consider, even if it's just the value.7. I don't think they'll care about items your dwarves name on their own.

Quote from: LordBaal

Will starting scenarios have some kind of limits according to the context. IE a roadside inn will have a low pop cap and relative few military immigrants? Will prisons and military forts have a more official, orderly immigration? Will prison colonies have prisoners arriving in cages on wagons or beast of burden or at least escorted by military/police dwarves?

Yeah, the whole point is that there will be actual differences. It would be best for the limits to be non-artificial and mutable based on how the situation at the site changes, but we'll see what we get the first time around.

Quote from: Daniel the Finlander

Does the "socialize" activity develop dwarves' relationships and skills?

Will there be more social activities besides storytelling and performing in the future?

Any plans for other decorational furniture besides display cases?

I would say yes, but if it doesn't, it's related to the bug where they don't get married, since that's all the same chatting code which is apparently broken in some way.

We already have all the world gen festivals that haven't yet made it to play, so there are a lot of future activities on the plate there (from sport/art competitions to processions to rituals etc.).

Not that I remember, though it's the sort of thing that seems to pop up tangentially.

Quote from: Rockphed

What temple architecture changes are on the menu for this release?

I just need a place to store artifacts. As much time as I'm going to end up burning in the map section, architecture is not a focus.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

Can you talk a little about point four under background changes (balance desire to display with guards/traps/etc.)? Are you going to overhaul traps at all, or will it just be cage/rock/mummy surprise for now? And guards, how will they work? Will they be expanded to guard other stuff (shops, etc) and will they be a feature in fortress mode too? Helpful to keep away the kobolds, I guess.

Also, talking of thieves, will artifact hunting adventurers be announced like kobold thieves, or will they operate more subtly, turning up like regular visitors, mercenaries/monster hunters or something?

Nah, I'm not going to have a chance to do the big trap rewrite now. Guards are still unplanned. Ideally, we'd have a few different MOs for adventuring groups (siege code vs. the new diplomacy-before-invasion thing vs. visitors), but only get to so much for this time.

Quote from: darklord92

Will museum zones/rooms be considered locations, and attract visitors?

Nope. I just needed a room.

Quote from: vjmdhzgr

Is there any kind of situation that can cause an adventurer to only be able to gain skill while focused? Because supposedly it's happened to someone, but I've never seen it myself.

Not as far as I can tell looking at this. It's always possible there's a bug or something I'm missing, but focus/distraction just affects your own skill roll, which doesn't determine the skill gain.

Quote from: voliol

Now that the game is 64-bit, would it be possible/feasible to store the physical/mental descriptions of historical figures to be seen in legends mode? Or when you look at their corpses?

It only gives us a few extra GB for a lot people, so I'm not sure we can keep everything loaded even now. Things can uncompress and allocate quite large (though I'm not sure that would be an issue with ~25000 units). However, they have the potential to slow down lookups and other code if they aren't properly quarantined, so there are all sorts of other annoyances. The best thing is probably just to load the unit files in legends mode, which is feasible and just isn't done now because legends mode doesn't currently use them.

Quote from: Random_Dragon

What are the overall mechanics behind armor wear? What material properties are considered when determining damage, which are more important, and what armor/weapon tokens might potentially affect it?

It's the same calculations used for the combat code in general. Overall momentum and relative shear/impact material properties are the important part.

Quote from: TheFlame52

Elves are at peace with wildlife. Why do wild animals still rampage in their sites?

Why don't megabeasts breed in worldgen anymore? The last time I saw it happen was like 0.34, and semimegas still breed just fine.

The first is just an oversight.

I dunno what's going on with megabeasts. I'll have to check.

Quote from: falcc

Are there any plans for adventurers to be able to tell how large an animal is relative to them? The wiki is great but it'd be nice to just look at something and know where it stands relative to my bird person.

Will miasma or an equivalent ever be in adventure mode? Will there ever be smells, death or otherwise, that make can make adventurers nauseous based on discipline, willpower or some other stat? Do NPCs use their sense of smell at all right now for figuring out if someone is sneaking nearby? If not will they eventually? Are there any plans to make items/foods/chemicals/potions/plants that can overwhelm sense of smell and make tracking/being tracked harder? Are there any other scent or tracking things planned for the thief arc?

I just realized dwarves in fort mode sometimes have things in their profiles about grunting when exasperated. Are any of these planned to be visible in adventure mode as actions when a character gets in a certain emotional range, or are they exclusively fort mode flavor?

Any plans for long distance teleportation within a single world/plane during the magical arc?

Will there be families/relationships for adventurers when you get into the family/law/etc arc?

I don't have particular plans for the first two. Ideally we'd have more things in the game.

We'd been hoping to get to the mannerisms -- we have the emotional states now, but there are fewer situations in adventure mode that use the emotion code, and it doesn't apply emotion code to every utterance in conversations, so we're still not quite to the place where we can use the mannerism triggers as stated in the paragraph.

Teleportation is one of the effects in the magic system generator as it stands now, but we don't have any idea which effects will actually be used in the game on the first pass.

I don't know if adventurer families will go in at the same time as the basic rewrite. We won't have time to get to all the repercussions.

Quote from: Untrustedlife

1. Why does the world arbitrarily explode into massive amounts of war and reclamations after world gen ends immediately when world activation begins?

2. I may have asked this before, I am not sure, but do you plan to improve bards in the future, like for example will player bards eventually be able to "teach" people through apprenticeship their various poems and dances like the troupe leaders in world gen do, do you plan to allow the player to send members of their troupe to places directly and will people eventually tip you if you are performing in the street? Will "meed hall performer" eventually become something more then "you can just sleep here now" (it doesnt even show up in legends!)?

1. Somebody asked about this before. I haven't gotten a chance to check what's going on.

2. We're hoping that the actions taken are available in each mode (between world gen, dwarf and adv). We skipped all the economy related stuff.

Quote from: kontako

Will weapon racks and armour stands also be used as display furniture?

They are still thoroughly broken. Some issue or another stopped me from fixing them the last few times, but eventually we'll handle it.

Quote from: Random_Dragon

That reminds me...I can't recall if I've asked this, but what WAS your reason for implementing branches as their own separate item token BRANCH, instead of PLANT_GROWTH or some other pre-existing item token? Was there some odd bug that cropped up encouraging you to make a separate token, or was there some other reason?

Using PLANT_GROWTH would require an extensive raw rewrite, and that wasn't in the cards at the time. BRANCH is fine.

Quote from: 90908

Toady will you, at any point, have apocalyptic events within the game? I'm talking invasions of Angels/demons, angry gods, natural disasters, plagues and so on. If you do in fact have plans for these, how do you think they will be implemented.

We're hoping to get some things along these lines with the myth release, including the end of the world entirely in certain settings. It's completely unclear how it is going to play out though.

What are the overall mechanics behind armor wear? What material properties are considered when determining damage, which are more important, and what armor/weapon tokens might potentially affect it?

It's the same calculations used for the combat code in general. Overall momentum and relative shear/impact material properties are the important part.

Quote from: Random_Dragon

That reminds me...I can't recall if I've asked this, but what WAS your reason for implementing branches as their own separate item token BRANCH, instead of PLANT_GROWTH or some other pre-existing item token? Was there some odd bug that cropped up encouraging you to make a separate token, or was there some other reason?

Using PLANT_GROWTH would require an extensive raw rewrite, and that wasn't in the cards at the time. BRANCH is fine.

1. Aw, no hint as to whether X_YIELD, X_FRACTURE, or X_STRAIN_AT_YIELD might be more important among those three?

2. Heh. Now you're reminding me of the modding effort I put into copy-pasting "FAKED" growths for plants that currently can't be harvested in adventure mode. And the "faked branches as growth on trunks" was a pain in the ass in to add, one tree at a time. So I can understand that. XP

Wow, I didn't realize I asked questions so many times this month. I just find myself playing a lot and things come to me every few weeks. Thanks for the answers anyway. As always I'm even more excited for new updates with all this new information.

Aw, no hint as to whether X_YIELD, X_FRACTURE, or X_STRAIN_AT_YIELD might be more important among those three?

STRAIN_AT_YIELD is not likely to matter for wear. FRACTURE should cause a lot more damage than YIELD, but I don't know how that specifically actually works.

STRAIN_AT_YIELD refers to how much the material has deformed once the pressure on it is equal to YIELD. YIELD is the pressure where it starts undergoing permanent deformation instead of elastic deformation. FRACTURE is the pressure where the material fails completely and fractures.

FRACTURE and YIELD are both in pascals, STRAIN_AT_YIELD is a dimensionless value (strain, parts-per-100,000)

STRAIN_AT_YIELD is not likely to matter for wear. FRACTURE should cause a lot more damage than YIELD, but I don't know how that specifically actually works.

STRAIN_AT_YIELD refers to how much the material has deformed once the pressure on it is equal to YIELD. YIELD is the pressure where it starts undergoing permanent deformation instead of elastic deformation. FRACTURE is the pressure where the material fails completely and fractures.

FRACTURE and YIELD are both in pascals, STRAIN_AT_YIELD is a dimensionless value (strain, parts-per-100,000)

I suspected that strain at yield was not a factor, yes. If I recall, strain-at-yield also works inversely, where it seems lower values are better in combat mechanics. This, bone armor suffering severely from the armor mechanics, and bone having a fairly low strain at yield all support the idea that it doesn't affect combat that much.

Now this leads to another idea. If fracture is the one more likely to affect wear, I'll have to see whether yield versus fracture is most important with respect to actual damage of body tissues and damage to the wearer of armor.

If yield is more important in that case, it presents me a possible way to mod certain materials to be harder-wearing without excessively buffing their defensive value in combat.

FRACTURE is more important to damage--reaching FRACTURE leads to "tearing" while YIELD leads to bruising (if vascular and elastic) or denting (if nonelastic).

I mean, I did explain exactly what they mean. That's not what they're supposed to mean, that's basically exact meaning. STRAIN_AT_YIELD being more-strain-is-higher should've meant lower-is-better, yeah. TENSILE_STRAIN_AT_YIELD (for example) of 10000 means that an object pulled apart to its YIELD limit will become twice as long in the process; COMPRESSIVE will become half the size, TORSION twist 2π radians, SHEAR means that two line segments in the cross section parallel to the shear vector of the sheared object1 that could formerly be connected end-to-end to make a rectangle would now make a parallelogram such that the top-left corner of the parallelogram forms a right triangle with the bottom right corner and the top right corner2, IMPACT is completely ignored when above 50000, I don't know exactly what it represents.

1I'M SORRY I DON'T KNOW HOW TO UNJARGON THIS2 seriously there's probably a better way to say that

Will there be a sort of list of spells/effects hardcoded (or computed) or in a .txt file in relation to spheres and which have to be "found" (like the current scholar/knowledge system), or will this be randomized in each world, and if if this is the case, how ?Will the player have a sort of "list" of magic spells that can be used in a fight (like you could use a Ballista), or will this be decided by the NPC wizard (like any other sort of weapon) ?Will the magic be managed with a "Mana" system or a "Spell per day" ? Or any other system ?

I'm very curious of how you will make something really different from standard RPG magic with detailled spells that have some very specific characteristics.

Thanks !

EDIT : It's not need to answer, I have had my information thanks to the very interesting GDC talk I hadn't listened until now.

Do you have any change in mind for the communication system between people?You mentioned a long time ago the possibility of using tones and intentions while you speak to another person as modifiers, like when you fight, which would be awesome by itself, but I would love knowing if eventually we will get a more robust system, highly tied to the psychology of dwarves (conversations change drastically between different people, etc.)Keeping on this line, will we get more stuff that make our adventurer's personality matter more? For now, the only thing that changes between one or another is the needs you have, derived from your personality, but it doesn't affect interactions between beings at all, which I kinda expectedThank you really for creating this awesome game, and best of luck with the upcoming events

Will there be a sort of list of spells/effects hardcoded (or computed) or in a .txt file in relation to spheres and which have to be "found" (like the current scholar/knowledge system), or will this be randomized in each world, and if if this is the case, how ?Will the player have a sort of "list" of magic spells that can be used in a fight (like you could use a Ballista), or will this be decided by the NPC wizard (like any other sort of weapon) ?Will the magic be managed with a "Mana" system or a "Spell per day" ? Or any other system ?

I'm very curious of how you will make something really different from standard RPG magic with detailled spells that have some very specific characteristics.

Thanks !

You should watch the GDC Talk from earlier this year (Toady's part starts about 9 minutes in). It should answer several of your questions even if it's not the complete version.